The Company of Witches

Abstract

Disney’s live-action fantasy film Maleficent (2014) is a revisionist take on the animated Disney classic Sleeping Beauty (1959), which is itself an extended adaptation of the Charles Perrault variant of the fairy tale (1679). My paper analyses the film both as a direct response to one particular Disney fairy tale adaptation and as a more general deconstruction of tropes at the centre of the Disney mythology. I argue that in order to negotiate ideas of female monstrosity, Maleficent adopts a palimpsest-like approach similar to the narrative strategies of earlier feminist retellings of canonized fairy tales, commenting on both the history of fairy tales and the history of fairy tale criticism.